I'm not arguing that the vaccine's did nothing to slow the spread, only that the notion of them somehow stopping all spread seemed to be assumed for no good reason.

And keep in mind that most people are rational. You don't need to mandate things for people to adhere to the basic principle's behind them. You can significantly reduce spread if people know and are willing to isolate when presenting with certain symptoms. Combine that with proper contact tracing and you can easily cut off enough transmission to stabilize the situation.

The problem tends to arise that as the stabilizes the seriousness of the issue seems to wade and investment in containment, contact tracing etc, goes down. Add in the occasional new variant and we're just riding a rollercoaster up and down where we contain enough to get to the next big scare.